Why Rock Your Tech Report Rocks

I’ll try to give you a quick breakdown why I think this initiative is so important although the GovWin post does a much better job explaining it. See, contracting officers need to have a technical analysis on proposals. This lets the government know it’s getting a product that can do the job. Unfortunately, the technical folks like engineers doing these technical evaluations are overworked and and doing a technical analysis simply isn’t a high priority as their other duties. Add to it that many technical people aren’t trained to do this, and you’ve got an issue. So when contracting officers don’t get well-written, thoroughly-analyzed technical reports, there’s an increased chance that the product will be bad and taxpayer dollars will be squandered. (And a tech report that says “proposal is acceptable” is usually a solid indicator of no analysis being done. Nothing is ever perfect.)

This is where Rock Your Tech Report comes in handy. Between now and November 21, the initiative will try to build a free library of tips, templates and best practices on technical reports. This will serve as a sort of cheat sheet that can alleviate some of those issues. (Real tech reports aren’t being asked for because that they may contain proprietary contractor data). The best ones are vetted and posted to RockYourTechReport.tumblr.com starting December 5. Email your templates, tips and best practices to [email protected].